NOTES: This is a personal and selective list, and I apologize for leaving out anyone’s favorites. For the most part, I’ve tried to avoid citing genre hybrids and foreign language productions – with certain seminal exceptions like Blade Runner (noir/sci-fi) and M. Also, when I compare certain official classics such as The Maltese Falcon to films that are really dark – say, The Seventh Victim, The Woman in the Window (pictured above), or Huston’s own The Asphalt Jungle – they don’t seem all that noir to me, so I have omitted them.

Noir is a visual style (as I wrote in Bright Lights, it is “the collision of German Expressionism with documentary realism, paralleling the emergence of ‘the city’ as a character”) that in turn reflects a mindset, a way of seeing the world. In a true noir, evil is not confined to a few bad apples; there is something “out of joint” with the universe at large. Noir’s shadow of dread can be political in nature (malice, corruption, incipient fascism), metaphysical (the “fallen world”), psychological, or any combination thereof. It is not so much a genre as a world view that can be applied to any genre, yet – paradoxically – is most at home in the crime film.